


A Lonely Fire

by Eva



Category: Django Unchained (2012)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 14:00:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/699020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eva/pseuds/Eva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Afterlife, of a sort.  Django is dreaming, but King isn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Lonely Fire

**Author's Note:**

> For Geniusbee. Gosh I hope this works as I intended.

***

There is cold, and then there is a fire.  It must have always been there, King thinks vaguely as he trudges through the snow.  He blinks away the frost on his eyelids and kneels close to the low yellow flames.

He can hear the wind now, singing high and mournful in the mountains, and looks up to see the stars.  Constellations he remembers, yes, but not in the places he knows they ought to be.

And there is no North star.

“I’m dead,” he says aloud to the empty world, though his breath hangs in the frigid air.  He touches his chest and feels, for one terrible screaming moment, the gaping wound he incurred after killing Candie.  But when he looks, there is nothing there, and his hand rests on his unblemished vest.

So this is hell, he thinks, and moves closer to flickering, feeble fire.

***

Sometime later he moves.  The stars haven’t, and the fire has grown no higher or lower. The snow under his legs hasn’t melted, but he feels cold, so very blasted cold.  So he stands up and tucks his hands under his coat.

“Thank you,” he says politely, bowing slightly to the fire.  There is no reply, of course, and he turns away, thinking only of finding some sort of shelter, a cave or something like, in which he can try to warm up.  Possibly sleep.  Can one sleep in hell?

But as he leaves the faint halo of the fire, the cold deepens, broadens, bites into his skin and sinks into his bones.  The darkness falls about him like a cloak, the stars disappearing as the clouds gather, he presumes, judging from the sudden flurry of heavy, wet snowflakes sliding in a terrible caress down his cheeks.  The wind grows stronger, but oddly quieter, as he trudges farther and farther away, until his legs are sinking up and over his knees into the snow.  He can’t see anything, can’t hear anything, but his skin isn’t so lucky; every inch, exposed or no, is shrieking in agony from the cold.

He cries out, feels the words leave his lips, but hears nothing.  The dim memory of the fire rises then from the frozen depths of his brain and King turns back.

Just like that, the storm is gone, and the wind sighs in his ears.  The fire is immediately behind him, and the snow that caught his legs releases him graciously.

“Then I’m trapped,” he says aloud, and is surprised by the warmth of his angry, helpless tears.

***

There are footsteps, crunching over the brittle snow.  King looks up and feels his heart thunder into sudden, wrenching agony.

Django steps into the little circle of firelight, his eyes cutting this way and that, before they rest with their customary intensity on King’s small, huddled form.

“You is dead,” he says, and King almost laughs, though the pain being drummed through his veins now makes him feel weak and wobbly. 

“That I am,” he manages in something close to his living panache.  ”I assume you are as well?”

It’s not an easy question to ask; the bright, searing pain in his throat is the taste of blood, the numbness that makes his clumsy tongue ache is the bitter, endless cold of the mountain.  But they are nothing, they are easy prices to pay in order to see his dear friend, to hear him speak.

And Django does speak.  ”No.  Me and Hildy got away.”

For a moment, King thinks he sees the sun, rising over the mountains, molten and gloriously bright.  But when he blinks his eyes to clear them, the great light is gone, and so is Django.

***

It could be moments; it could be years before Django comes to the fire again.  King doesn’t know.  There is no way to measure time here.  

But there are footsteps, and the pain in his heart spills over again, igniting an answering ache all along his arteries.  ”You is dead,” Django says, and King stands, slowly and painfully, feeling like he hasn’t moved in years.

“And you aren’t,” he says tiredly, but with affection.  He can’t hide it any longer, and why would he want to?  He’s dead.  He has no more need of secrets.

Django’s face is stern in the firelight.  ”You here to haunt me?”

“I haven’t left this fire since,” King pauses, then shrugs.  ”Since I died, I—no, I lie.  I tried to leave it once.  It doesn’t go well.”

“How do you mean?”

King spreads his hands, smiling even though it hurts his lips to do so.  ”I have to stay here.  You, my friend, come and go.”

“Do I?” Django asks, and there is a furrow in his brow.  ”I only been here once.”

“You don’t remember?” King asks, and feels a terrifying, completely unwelcome coldness in his heart when Django shakes his head slowly, still staring at King with his heavy, focused gaze.  ”You were here before.  You told me you and Brunhilde had survived.”

“We did,” Django says slowly, and sits down now, cross-legged, on the opposite side of the fire.  ”I told you that?”

“Not how,” King says.  ”Just that you and she got away.”

Django nods.  ”Well.  They tried to sell me to a mine, so I took some dynamite and went back and blew their house to hell.”  
The warmth that fills him now is nothing like pain, even if it makes his limbs ache as they seem to remember life.

***

Django comes to the fire a third time, and King is finally able to say it.  His throat tight, foul with the taste of grief and shame, he says, “Django, I’m so sorry.”

“What’s this?” Django demands, and his eyes are cold and suspicious, angry for some reason King can’t fathom.  ”You is dead, King.”

“I know, and I’m sorry,” King bursts out, standing up and hearing his knees crack, the sound as loud as two gunshots in his ears.  ”I couldn’t stop myself, not even for-for Brunhilde.”  His voice falters at the last.  It isn’t what his heart meant for him to say.

“This a dream,” Django tells him, blinking and staring around.  ”This Wyoming, ain’t it?”

“If it’s a dream, does it matter if it’s Wyoming?”  King swallows against the shame rising up again in his throat, acidic bile.  ”This may be the only chance I have to apologize, Django.  Please let me.”

Django stares at him now, his face fierce and angry.  ”Why you think I want your apology, King?”

***

It’s with relief that King greets Django again, agreeing again that he is dead, yes, and that Django is alive, as is Brunhilde.  Though it’s old news to him, he appreciates that it isn’t to Django, and feels a terrible warmth in his chest as he recognizes he has another chance to apologize, and properly this time.

“Django—”

“This Wyoming, ain’t it?” Django asks, looking around.  He nods to the sky.  ”The stars is wrong, though.”

“It’s not precisely Wyoming,” King says, squirming a bit.  It might be purgatory, though King never believed in that sort of thing.  He had never believed in heaven, either; only in hell.  ”Django.  Please allow me to explain—”

“You haunting me?” Django asks, and there’s the quirk to his lips that always made King’s skin feel tight.  Even dead, he feels it, and tries again to shy away from it.  ”That ain’t friendly.”

“If you would allow me to finish my, ah, unfinished business, perhaps I can stop haunting you,” King says, and feels a triumphant sort of thrill as he does.  That must be it: he’s here to apologize, and properly, and then it can end. 

“You got something to say to me?” Django asks, and his voice is tighter now.  He isn’t happy, not in the least.

“Please allow me to apologize,” King says, and almost topples backward as Django jumps to his feet, reaching for a gun that isn’t there.

“Why you think I want your apology?” Django snarls, and his chance is lost again as his friend fades, the lonely fire asserting itself as the only reality.

***

“King,” Django says, and King tries to smile, looking up from the fire.

“Django.”

He stands against the sky and King thinks that, someday, there may be a constellation named for him, if the world ever remembers again to be just.  The twinge of pain that accompanies that thought makes his hand jerk, one tiny movement toward his chest, but Django sees.

“You hurt?” he demands, stepping over the fire.  King opens his mouth to deny it, to laughingly admit the impossibility of it.  He shuts his mouth when Django draws his hands away from his chest, the better to scrutinize his huddled form.

“I’m fine,” he rasps.

“You got shot,” Django says, as if just remembering, his hands curling hard around King’s wrists.  He looks up from under a thunderous brow and, this close, his eyes are darker than the space between the stars.  ”You died on that stinking slaver’s floor, you son of a bitch.”

King feels the incredulous smile stretching across his face.  ”Are you angry?”

Django’s face twists, and King’s breath sticks thick in his throat as he’s pulled, dragged forward into the man’s arms.  He feels beard scratch his face; strong hands digging through the padding of his overcoat and jabbing into his ribs.  The words whispered harshly into his neck make King’s skull heat, as with fever.

“You lucky you is dead, King, or I’d kill you my own damn self.”

“You don’t want an apology,” King whispers, and the stuck breath is forced from his lungs, heaving out into the chill night air as Django sees fit to crush him even closer.  It hurts, but could anything be more welcome?  Especially to a dead man.

“This a dream, ain’t it?” Django asks, and there’s something so terribly raw in his voice that in spite of everything he’s learned, King opens his mouth to apologize.  ”You stupid bastard.  I killed them.  Every last damn one of them.  For you and Hildy.  I killed them.”

“For Brunhilde, then,” King says gently, easing back as much as he can.  Django’s hands still dig into his ribs, preventing him from doing much but settling back onto his own legs.  The cold is no greater than it has ever been in the presence of the little fire, but he trembles in it.  ”My mind needs no setting to rest.  She is well, I trust?”

“She better than you,” Django mutters, and his hard hands relax, coming around to King’s chest, smoothing over the unbroken expanse of it.  His eyes are fixed on the buttons and he can’t see the agonized grimace King directs at the sky.  ”We’s alive.”

“There is some grace, then, in the world,” King says, and his legs are burning with pins and needles, starved of blood and protesting it.  Django’s hand clenches over his vest, drawing the material up and tight.

“You could of been with us,” Django grits out.

***

For a time, he doesn’t recognize the changing quality of the light, and then he does.  The flames are more orange, licking higher than before, though they provide the same feeble heat.  King licks his lips, holding his hands out as if they might get warm.

He feels even colder now, he thinks sourly.

It’s too much to ask of him, he decides, to stay at this tiny fire and wait for Django to come to him again.  ”I’m dead, after all,” he tells the fire.  ”It’s not as if I can die again.”

And even that might be more welcome than the alternative.  ”I thank you again,” he says shortly and stands up, tucking his overcoat more securely around his body.  The shrieking of the mountain wind grows louder and he trudges, determined, into the shadows surrounding his open air prison.

Somewhere, locked deep in memories he refuses to examine, is the sickening heat of Mississippi, a heat that steals into the body and saps it of strength, drawing out its moisture while slicking the skin with a sweat that can’t dry.  It’s a slow agony, a slide into apathetic thrall.  The cold he tries to face now is the other side of the coin; an active, ripping, rending freeze that brutally invades his mouth and eyes and nose, seeming to set entire layers of tissue to peel and curl.  He screams, once, and hears nothing, feels no breath pass along his split and stinging lips.

It is impossible.  He isn’t aware of turning, but the pain abruptly lessens and he finds himself on hands and knees in front of the orange fire, gasping and sobbing out obscenities he hasn’t heard used since Germany, since childhood and its end.  

There is nowhere to go.  

“Fucking hellfire!” he roars at the flames, and lurches to his feet to kick them out, to take his anger out on something.  He stamps on the wood, on the coals, and feels horribly like ants are crawling wherever the flames lick at his clothes.  Stamping and kicking and whirling about, ashes crumbling to dust even as they leave the pit, he feels hysterical; he feels mad.

And the flames flicker easily around him, burning on in the absence of fuel, burning brighter, perhaps, than before.

***

“I been here how many times?”

Django’s expression is openly incredulous. The lines of stress around his mouth are fainter, too, and King realizes that time has passed. Enough time that Django and Brunhilde must be someplace safer than the deep South. 

“Thirteen,” he answers plainly, and laughs suddenly in a great burst of tension. “I’ve attempted an apology four times.”

He feels rather than sees Django drawing himself up and continues in a hurry. “No, my friend, I won’t insult you again. I simply don’t understand the, the purpose of this place, of your company, if I...”

The firelight flickers over Django’s lax hands. “Maybe you ain’t been paying attention, then.”

Meeting his eyes is like facing the wind away from the fire, but if he won’t accept an apology, then this is all King has left. “You have a different theory?”

“You always remember, and I always forget.” Django’s jaw is tight and King feels a long-accustomed yearning to feel its strength with his bare hand. “Seems to me I’m not the one who’s supposed to be listening.”

King blinks three times, hard, before he can bark out another laugh. “Well! Well, yes, perhaps. But what could you have to tell me?”

Django gives a slow, measured nod. “I knew you wouldn’t make it out of there.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He leans forward, his eyes intense, reflecting the fuel-less fire. “You broke character. A day in. Your own damn rule and you couldn’t keep it.”

King shakes his head, but it isn’t to deny: it’s to stop him, before he says what King absolutely cannot hear. Not after killing Candie; not after choosing his own death and the deaths of his dear friends over ignoble life--

“I knew you couldn’t go through with it after d’Artagnon got killed and I made you go ahead--”

“Shut up!” King half-shouts, leaping to his feet and walking away three steps, just enough that the wind begins to sting. Over the thunderous riot of blood in his ears, he hears Django stand.

He breathes in, and the air is sharper than knives. He thinks that might be why he tastes blood. “I understand,” he says at last, with an effort, turning back to face him. Django, standing and illuminated in the orange glow of the fire. “If I can’t apologize to you, then you can’t apologize to me.”

“Don’t know if it’s that simple,” Django says, and if ever he felt his heart might break, it’s in this moment, as Django wakes again to his life and King sinks to his knees by the fire, still bound to what hasn’t been said.

***

“Do you see that?” King asks, and he’s almost laughing. Something is breaking apart within him. “It’s almost dawn.”

Django looks to the east, nods slowly. “The stars is wrong, though.”

He has a fuller beard, and King’s eyes are drawn to it again and again. How much time has passed? How much time could pass, if he were to distract his friend, keep his company and leave his last secret unshared?

“You must be busy,” he ventures, redirecting his stare to the fire. “I trust that you and Brunhilde are safely away from the South?”

There is a long moment of silence, a silence that King would recognize even in the deepest pits of hell. He tries to ignore it, but he can’t help to meet Django’s searching gaze.

“I thought this was a dream,” Django says, half-accusing, half-musing. King feels the desperate laughter bubbling up in his chest again. This is not a dream; this is not a way station. He can’t spend his eternal damnation here.

So he is honest, because Django deserves nothing less. “I think it is, for you.”

“But not for you.”

King shakes his head, but it isn’t to deny. The laughter has turned to bitterness, which is far more welcome to his mind. “When the sun rises, I think it might be.”

Django turns to look again at ghostly pale light in the east. Not bright enough to be true light, King thinks, following his gaze. 

“You haunting me?”

“I might be,” King says, and his smile stings as fragile skin parts from skin. “I don’t mean to be.”

“You might be,” Django scoffs, but laughs, quietly, under his breath. The air is warmer when King looks at him again. “We in Canada now. Hildy and me. Outside a place called Victoria. They tell me it’s named for a queen.”

Warm, yes. King moves closer to the fire nevertheless, focused intently on his friend.

“We got a house out in the forest, do a bit of trading.” Django’s smile is self-deprecating. “I do a bit of hunting. Keep my aim sharp. Some trapping, too. Lot of people out there looking for gold, they need someone to find them food.”

“And Brunhilde?” King asks when his voice works. He flushes a little at Django’s smile; it’s a private smile, belonging to the one he loves so dearly.

“She doing well. Learning some more languages, translating back and forth for the miners.” Django pauses, but the smile is still curling around the edge of his mouth. “She a bit busy taking care of our boy, too.”

The warmth spills over and out of King’s eyes. “Your--your son?”

“Our boy King.”

In that moment, the sun very nearly rises.

***

He tests it the very next moment, after Django is gone, after he has dried his eyes. His mind flinches around the memory, of the richness of his friend’s tone as he says the name of his son.

“Too much,” he whispers, and it’s true. It is a gift beyond heaven, and far more than he has ever, ever deserved.

There is a faint line of gold in the east, and King descends fully halfway down the mountain, his heart beating harder with each step, his lungs filling with sweet, clear air. If this is a dream, he thinks, then life is pale imitation.

He could leave now, but.

The fire is out, though there are coals glowing still. King looks to the west and can see new constellations, ones he yet doesn’t recognize, but he feels as if there will be time to become familiar with them.

“One more time,” he says--no, he vows. The growing line of light pulls at him, but there is something left unsaid. There is something more this night has to offer him, if he’ll stay.

***

“Tell me again,” Django demands, and King has to laugh, turning his face up to the slowly brightening sky.

“I’m dead, you’re alive, this is a dream, you’ve had it before.” He laughs again, clapping his hands together and startling some great bird, an eagle perhaps, into flight. “Tell me again about your son, and spare no detail.”

“What, you know?” Django is laughing as well, though he looks rather put-out that such news has been preempted by King himself. But it means that King can stand, his smile broad and eyes dry, to clasp his friend’s hand over the nearly spent fire.

“Congratulations,” he says warmly, and splutters when Django pulls him, making him step over the coals, and wraps him in an embrace that King wishes he might never leave. But that isn’t an option available to him, not even in death.

So he pulls away, his smile still achingly bright.

“I told you his name in another dream, then,” Django says, but he can’t hide the laughter in his eyes. He keeps his hands on King’s arms, not allowing him to step entirely away. “You approve?”

“It is gifted at last to a child who deserves it.”

“You deserved it.”

Shaking his head and trying to step away is automatic, done without thought, and King only realizes his actions when Django holds him from movement and repeats himself, softer but with a greater intensity. “You deserve it.”

“No,” King says. “You can’t say that when I betrayed you.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Don’t ask me that,” King says helplessly, trying again to step away. Django’s hold is like iron, and for a moment, King is almost afraid. “You wouldn’t let me apologize. I wouldn’t let you. But you continued for Brunhilde’s sake and I could not for anyone’s--”

Abruptly, Django lets him go, and the panic recedes. King stumbles back, two steps, before Django’s hand is on his wrist, gentle, helping him to recover and stand still.

“There’s something you got to understand, before you say anything else,” Django says roughly, and then clears his throat. King stares at his hand, its gentle circle around his wrist.

“Me and Hildy run away. You know that.”

“The lashings,” King whispers. He feels a shiver of hatred run through him. “The R on her face.”

“You don’t run away because you think you gon’ live, King. Slaves ain’t got nowhere to go. Not when they in the Deep South. We run away because we know we gon’ die.”

King looks up, the shock traveling all along his spine. Django’s face is stern and hard.

“D’Artagnon didn’t think he was gon’ live. Why you think he begged? If they think you strong, they make you suffer. They make it slow. They make you live, but they make it hell. Because they know what you want is to die.”

King’s whole body is shaking. Django reaches out to take his other hand, to hold them both, offering strength.

“He run away because he wanted to die, and they wouldn’t let him. Me and Hildy run away the same. And you, well, that why you shot him, isn’t it? Because you couldn’t live in a world where he lived, too.”

“But--” There’s nothing to say after that, no real denial. King’s mind is swimming desperately for a rebuttal, but there is nothing. It’s the truth, the simple, unfortunate, cowardly truth.

“Ain’t cowardly,” Django says sharply, and King wonders dazedly if he said it aloud. “You don’t know what slavery is, even now. You had a glimpse, and it shook you so much you couldn’t live with it. But you didn’t see a way out of it, either, because there weren’t.”

“There isn’t,” King chokes out.

“There is.”

“A hundred thousand men buying a hundred thousand more?” King demands, his vision blurred with rage. “Telling them, here is your freedom! When freedom is what they should have, right now, this very instant!” He wants to continue in German, but Django wouldn’t understand. “The ignorant white man leading the battle against a hundred thousand more who know exactly the evils they are committing, and they don’t care!”

“You a fool if you count the black man out, King.”

The very gentleness of his voice brings King out of his rage, and he blinks to clear his eyes.

“I met a woman, she settled out east of me and Hildy. It autumn and she’ll stay there for winter, but come spring, she going south. Deep South, like she do every summer.” Django nods to himself. “She brings them folks who want to run up the north way, along the railroad. You ain’t heard of it, I guess.”

“A railroad?” King repeats, and Django shakes his head.

“Ain’t a train, the railroad’s just what they call it. The Underground. Slaves escaping along to the north, up to freedom. I’ll be heading down there myself, come spring.” His eyes were very bright. “Gon’ bring some folks up north, where things is still hard, but ain’t no one gon’ be owned.”

It’s too much information to process immediately, and King simply goggles as Django continues, “Buying if we has to, running if we can. There a place to go now, King. We got a reason to hope. And so do you, because some of those folks running this railroad is as white as you. You understand me?”

“I don’t know,” King says honestly, and nearly jumps out of his skin when Django wipes a tear from his cheek. “Brunhilde and K--and your son?”

“Stay with them all winter. Find us some neighbors in the summer.” Django grins. “Got to get us some good working black folks, folks who know how to work and cook and farm. Slavers don’t know how strong they been making us.”

The sunlight breaks over the eastern horizon, sudden and sharp and bright, and King put his hand up to his eyes. Django turns to face it, eyes open.

“But you got somewhere to be going yourself, I think.”

“I do,” King says, and his voice is shaky, though at last his body is not. One last moment, one last time, he looks up at his dearest friend. “Good luck, Django Freeman.”

Django holds his face with both hands and presses his lips, dry, to King’s forehead. It is a moment that will stand King in good stead against anything that might come later. “Auf wiedersehen, King.”

He won’t look back. He can’t look back, as he starts down the mountain. But he feels Django's gaze, even when he descends at last to a green valley.

***


End file.
